Bangladesh has an impressive track record for growth and development, aspiring to be a middle-income country by its 50th birthday. The World Bank has supported Bangladesh since 1972, providing more than $15 billion in support.
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Bangladesh's Public Service
Commission (PSC) is a constitutionally mandated custodian of
merit-based recruitment to the civil service. In practice,
however, it is perceived... Show More + to be a weak organization that has
not always well-managed the recruitment process. Since the
1990s the media has reported politicized appointment of its
members. Recently there have been allegations of examination
irregularities, including leakage of question papers of the
civil service examinations. The management of the PSC and
its role in civil service recruitment has departed from
comparative administrative practice. This note argues that
the PSC's independence from micromanagement by the
executive, and its improved management of the civil service
examination are critical for its credibility to uphold the
merit principle. It lists short- and medium-term actions
that could help in restoring the PSC's intended role
and functions. PSCs are common in administrative traditions
where the appointed executive is meant to be permanent,
politically neutral and unaligned to any particular
political party or group of elected officials. A PSC forms a
critical piece of the public sector's good governance
framework by providing a check and balance between the
government's interest and its employee's
interests. In recruitment, which is an important element of
civil service management, the PSC protects the
government's interest by selecting the best among
available candidates for a particular position. Show Less -

Bangladesh has made striking progress on
a range of social indicators over the last 15 years, an
achievement widely credited to the country's pluralist
service provision... Show More + regime. Nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) have significantly expanded their services during
this period and have shown that it is possible to scale up
innovative antipoverty experiments into nationwide programs.
Notable innovations that were expanded include delivering
credit to the previously "unbankable" poor,
developing a non-formal education program to cater to poor
children, particularly girls, and using thousands of
village-based community health workers to provide doorstep
services. The fact that poor women constitute a large
proportion of NGO beneficiaries, despite the persistence of
strong patriarchal norms, also testifies to institutional
innovation. The unique role of Bangladesh's NGOs is not
confined to the delivery of social services and pro-poor
advocacy. NGOs have developed commercial ventures in order
to link poor producers with input and output markets, as
well as to develop a source of internally generated revenue
for the organizations. However, the rapid growth and
diversification of the NGO sector has also given rise to
questions and concerns. These include the viability of a
regulatory framework developed when the size and scope of
NGOs was far more limited, the appropriate political and
commercial spaces for NGO activities, trade-offs between NGO
sustainability and pro-poor orientation, the impact and
quality of NGO services as they have scaled up, NGO
corporate governance, and the implications of different
government-NGO partnerships. There has been little
systematic review of the public policy implications of the
changing character of NGOs in Bangladesh. The present report
seeks to augment this effort. The first part of the report
presents the Bangladesh context, the current debates
surrounding NGOs, and an analytical framework within which
to examine these issues. It then turns to the questions of
what NGOs do, whom they cater to, how their programs and
expenditures differ from those of other providers, and what
impact their programs have had on individual, household, and
community welfare. The report next takes a close look at
issues related to the financing of NGO activities through
donor support, government contracts, private contributions,
microfinance income, and commercial activities. The basic
questions here concern the relative importance of these
various sources of income, changing trends in financing, and
the implications of these trends for the nature of NGO
activity in the medium term. The authors then assess the
status of the legal and regulatory framework, relating it to
the scope of activities and financing trends discussed
earlier. As part of this, the report assesses the state of
financial accountability and corporate governance in the NGO sector. Show Less -